R devel - Mar 2010 - Update 2 on MinGW-w64 builds for 64-bit Windows

This post updates

https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2010-January/056301.html
https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-devel/2010-January/056411.html

The MinGW-w64 snapshots have moved back to gcc pre-4.4.4 (from 
pre-4.5.0) with static linking to C++ and Fortran run-time DLLs, and 
seem more stable.  Currently the CRAN package check pages at 
http://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_summary.html are showing 
101/2182 failures, but ca 40 packages are failing on all 64-bit 
platforms in R-devel, and 21 further CRAN packages (plus Rgraphviz and 
a couple of Omegahat packages) are available on CRANextras after 
manual tweaking.  At one point we had installed all the BioC 
dependencies of CRAN packages from the bioc-devel sources, but 
rtracklayer does not currently build on Windows.

Thus there are ca 40 CRAN packages which have issues specific to 
64-bit Windows.  Most of these are due to dependencies which are 
currently unavailable because external software is not, notably BRugs 
rgdal rggobi and rjags.  There are only four which fail in ways not 
seen on at least one other platform.

We do not anticipate any major changes to the build before 2.11.0 is 
released (most likely in April), and it can now be regarded as at 
'beta' status -- users with a 64-bit Windows OS and who do not need 
Bioconductor packages are encouraged to try it out.

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595